


For Love and Monet

by Syrena_of_the_lake



Category: To the Hilt - Dick Francis
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-17
Updated: 2020-12-17
Packaged: 2021-03-10 20:54:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,393
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28133505
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Syrena_of_the_lake/pseuds/Syrena_of_the_lake
Summary: In the world of art forgery, golf is not a frequent subject matter. So why was someone forging Al's paintings, and what greater mystery lurked behind the scenes? (A better question may have been: why hadn't Al learned yet to leave the sleuthing to the actual detectives?)
Comments: 9
Kudos: 28
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	For Love and Monet

**Author's Note:**

  * For [The_Midnight_Girl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Midnight_Girl/gifts).



“Mad Alexander, who messes about with paints...”

“One has to be slightly mad to do almost anything, such as hiding a treasure.”

\- Dick Francis, _To the Hilt_

* * *

A windworn wave of rock crested in the foreground, forever frozen before the splendor behind it: a sweeping vista of emerald hills flanking a silver loch. The painting was almost perfect. Almost every brushstroke was one Alexander Kinloch would have made himself.

Almost.

“You’re sure this isn’t yours?” persisted the detective from Young and Uttley. His persona today was plain old Chris of the faded jeans and forgettable jacket, which was fitting for a visit to Al’s mountain bothy.

“There’s no golf course on Loch Tay,” Al said dryly. “It’s not mine.”

Chris blinked at the seeming non sequitur.

“My paintings are mostly about golf. At least, the ones that sell.”

“You’re supposed to say they’re about blah-blah-blah courage of the human spirit,” Emily interjected helpfully. “Something-something perversity...”

“Don’t you mean perseverance?” asked Chris.

Emily smirked.

Al was getting a headache. “Can we please get back to the forgery?”

“I’ll need examples of your signature,” said Chris, mercifully getting back to business. “And the type of materials you use — whatever the equivalent of make and model is for acrylics and canvas — oh, and a list of genuine buyers for the last three years.”

Al’s head spun. Emily’s eyes widened. “Why don’t you ask him for the dates he painted everything while you’re at it?”

“I paint multiple pictures at a time,” said Al helplessly. “Three easels. I can’t possibly...”

“I don’t need the dates,” interrupted Chris. Al sighed in relief. “Approximate timeframe will be fine. Good idea, Emily.”

“Oops.” She offered up an apologetic smile.

Al glared at her, but his heart wasn’t in it. He put the year on every copyright sticker along with his name, in special ink that showed up in X-rays.

The forger had gotten that right, too.

Al wondered whether to drop the whole business. So what if someone could make red-flecked grasses like he did, and put his name on it? One fake painting wouldn’t break his reputation or the bank. Maybe he should just let it go, chalk it up to a learning experience, start keeping better records...

“How much did it sell for?” asked Emily, eyeing him.

Chris named a price that jolted Al out of his thoughts.

“Maybe I should stop painting golf,” he said ruefully. “I just don’t get it. This guy—”

“Or girl,” Emily interjected pointedly.

“— whoever they are, they can really paint. Why not just sell under their own name? I mean, sure, I’m established, but I’m no Picasso. Or why not forge a Monet or something worth a mint?”

“More scrutiny,” judged Chris.

“For the Monet, sure,” Emily objected, “but if this mystery painter is so talented, why wouldn’t they paint under their own name? Why risk getting caught for forgery? Over _golf_?”

Chris shrugged. “Maybe you have a fan. A really devoted fan.”

“You mean like a stalker movie?” Al laughed. “ _Fatal Acrylics_? _Play Magenta for Me? I Know What You Did Last Burnt Siena?”_

Emily shot him a withering look. “Don’t quit your day job.”

“I never claimed to be a writer.”

Chris chewed on a pencil. One of Al’s; he made a mental note not to use it for sketching later. “So the only proof we have of forgery is the lack of a golf ball and the fact that you don’t remember painting it? Not much of a case.”

“There must be _something_ off.” Emily squinted at the painting; Al watched her fondly. she would kill him if he ever painted her with a scrunched nose, but he found it ridiculously attractive.

“I do paint other scenes,” acknowledged Al, mentally skirting the memory of the last time he painted his wife for fear she would see the smug smirk and slug him in the arm. “Horse races, Scottish history, hunting dogs...”

“People,” said Emily with satisfaction. “Your paintings are lived-in. Even if it’s just a dog or a mountain or whatever, you always have this sense that someone has been there before you, or is there now, just out of sight.”

“Em.” Al blinked rapidly. After all this time, Emily still managed to surprise him. “You could be an art critic.”

“I know you, Al,” she said simply. “You’ve always told me you’re not alone when you’re painting, even way up here. _That_ painting, on the other hand... it’s pretty. But there’s no life in it.”

She was right. Al would have dotted the hillside with a few sheep, or feathered in the tail of a questing dog in the brush, or left a tarnished compass or a muddy bootprint in the lower corner. The painting was postcard-perfect in a way that nature never was. And Al had never been one to smooth out the wrinkles.

Chris cleared his throat loudly. “Next steps,” he prodded.

“We could bust an international forgery and smuggling ring!” Emily’s eyes sparkled.

“Good, because it’s been a year since I had the chance to play punching bag.” Al looked to Chris to inject some sanity back into the conversation.

“Paint me,” the detective said instead.

“As Young, Uttley or associate?” Diverted, Al envisioned a series of sketches: the same face, with layer upon layer of disguise receding into the paper, graphite upon graphite, until the only clearly defined elements were the core of the person: eye sockets slanted just so at the outer corner, a jawline that neither beard nor contoured makeup could hide, the shape of the nose, the wry curve of the smile. The man beneath the mystery.

“Anything.” Chris shrugged. “I’ll put the word out that I have a genuine Alexander for sale, cheap. Give our forger some competition. Like sending a dog into the grass to flush pheasants.”

“I prefer golf,” muttered Al resignedly.

* * *

In retrospect, they should have used a different model.

“How was I supposed to know the forger could recognize me?” Chris demanded. He shifted uncomfortably in the chair.

Al supposed the handcuffs weren’t any more comfortable than the zip tie around his own wrists.

“Eye sockets,” he sighed.

Chris rolled his giveaway eyes. “I don’t suppose they teach you lockpicking in art school.”

“Never went to formal art school,” grunted Al. He concentrated on trying to inch the penknife out of his pocket without dropping it. “I don’t suppose they teach you contortionism in detective school.”

He could _hear_ Chris rolling his eyes in their distinctive sockets.

“Al.”

“Not a contortionist, then?”

Chris ignored the admittedly pitiful attempt at levity. “Did you tell anyone we were coming here?”

Al didn’t like to think of himself as having a suspicious mind (although a little more suspicion deployed in the right direction could have saved him more than a little trouble over the years). But he knew what Chris was trying not to ask.

“I told Himself about the forgeries,” he admitted, “but not about the plan. Only Emily. And you can’t possibly think—”

“I don’t.”

Any further conversation and attempted zip tie-cutting had to be abandoned when the kidnappers returned with a second pair of handcuffs and a third henchman. The new arrival was built like a Clydesdale. He hefted Chris over one shoulder and carted him off without a word. Al saw Chris’s eyebrows working furiously but couldn’t begin to fathom what message he was trying to convey.

“I don’t suppose you’re interested in negotiating,” tried Al.

The first henchmen was only built like a Shetland pony — short and stocky — but nonetheless packed a punch that felt much like getting kicked by the real thing.

“Me neither,” wheezed Al It had been worth a try, although his ribs wouldn’t agree.

Even as the Clydesdale returned to haul him ignominiously away, Al couldn’t stop thinking. Why on earth were toughs like these interested in his paintings? He did well for himself, but he wasn’t arrogant enough to believe it was worth all this.

The Clydesdale shoved him unceremoniously in the back seat of a nondescript sedan. “Should’ve put ‘em in the boot,” he muttered.

“Boss said gentle,” snapped the Shetland, which Al and his bruised ribs thought was rich.

Chris was already sprawled in the seat next to him. “Al? You okay?”

“Peachy.”

They spoke little on the drive. The Clydesdale took the mountain curves with all the finesse Al would have expected from him. And especially with his hands still cuffed behind him, it took all Al’s concentration to stay upright.

“Where are we?” Chris asked when the road straightened out. Far from sounding worries, his voice was idly inquiring. A far better pretense at nonchalance than Al could muster under the circumstances. “If we’re anywhere in a twenty mile radius of Pitlochry, I could do with some fish and chips.”

No one answered. Chris grimaced and lapsed back into silence.

Al had held out some hope of escape while they were in the Highlands. These were _his_ mountains, damnit, and his moors. But the land and the road eventually flattened out, and the featureless highway reared its ugly head, promising civilization — which Al did not equate with promise of rescue. Unless they happened across a car accident and a curious policeman, they could be carted all the way to London with no one the wiser.

They stopped well short of London, however. Al’s knew only that they were somewhere near the coast, based on the damp gray rock, the salt-bitten wreck of a car parked next to them, and an indefinable sharpness in the air that Al had never known how to paint. He couldn’t hear the sea, but that could be due to the ringing in his ears from smacking his head against the car door when the Clydesdale had pulled him to his feet.

The house was a squat, lonely thing of stone and crumbling mortar, gray and damp like everything else. It was old enough to have small leaded glass windows with missing panes like gaps in an old man’s smile.

“Come into my lair, said the spider to the fly.” Clearly Chris did not take an optimistic view of their isolated location.

“They wouldn’t kill the golden goose,” said Al with a confidence he didn’t feel. Chris raised a skeptical eyebrow. Al thought of all the painters whose work had skyrocketed in value after their death. Christ. Al tamped firmly down on his imagination and his ego. He was no Monet.

Which was why it was so unnerving to walk through the door and, upon letting his eyes adjust to the darkness inside, be greeted by a gentle swirl of color that looked for all the world like a Monet.

Al gaped at it. He took a step forward. When no bruising fist materialized to stop him, he took another step.

“Al.”

Chris's warning never even registered.

_Monet._

Maybe it was just another forgery, like the one they had been so foolishly chasing. But the canvas glowed with dappled light and Al had the even more foolish thought that, if he had to die here, he could die happy, having seen an unknown masterpiece.

“A bit different than your usual, isn’t it?” The cultured voice had an Irish lilt and rang with good humor. Chris whipped around to face the newcomer.

Al ignored them both.

 _“Alexander is good at hiding things_ ,” the earl Himself had said once. Good God.

“My apologies for the reception committee, gentlemen. I’m embarrassed to admit that you caught me quite unawares. The genuine artist painting a forgery of himself, quite ingenious.”

Al at last looked at the other man. Slick black hair, piercing blue eyes, and a perpetual smirk tugging at one corner of his mouth.

“I hope my associates didn’t give you a rough time,” the man continued. “Without direct orders to the contrary, I’m afraid they are prone to reverting to old habits.”

“Habits have horsepower,” Al said obliquely. “Who are you?”

“Call me Mr. King.”

King as in kingpin? He who wears the crown? No matter. Alexander was a Kinloch. The only king who held his family’s loyalty had been dead for hundreds of years.

“I don’t suppose this is a paying commission,” said Al.

“What are you talking about?” demanded Chris. Still handcuffed, he shouldered his way in front of Al. King held his hands up in a gesture of peace and stepped back.

“I’m commissioning a painting from your friend,” he said, still smiling. “In return, I will leave you two here, alive and well and only slightly hindered by those handcuffs, I’m sure, while I get on a plane with my new painting: a golf scene, souvenir of Scotland.”

“Let me guess: water paints? Sorry, I only do acrylics.” Al glanced at Chris, who still looked baffled. “He wants me to hide his Monet,” he explained, “under another painting. One that can be washed away once he’s safely through customs.”

“That’s mad,” objected Chris.

_That’s me. Mad Alexander._

“I have your studio set up in the kitchen.” King gestured solicitously. “It has the best light.”

“How thoughtful.”

* * *

Al couldn’t blame the result on the paints, which were if anything superior quality to his normal acrylics, at least judging by the price tags. King had spared no expense. But Al had been constantly distracted by memorizing and analyzing the Monet. If he could start right away, he thought, he might be able to copy it from memory — at least a facsimile. A forgery.

Judging by King’s wry smile, he knew what Al was thinking.

He painted the view from the bothy, which he knew by heart, and it showed. The light was inconsistent where it fell among scraggly pines, and the boulders were too similar in shade and texture, and the sky lacked depth. He painted by rote, focusing more on the dots and swirls _beneath_ his brush, letting muscle memory carry him through burnt sienna and ochre, down the mountainside and beyond the horizon.

When he finished, the luminous Monet had been entirely submerged beneath his mediocre landscape. Waiting like daffodil bulbs to unfold in spring, after the obscuring snow and ice had been washed away.

“Sign it,” ordered King quietly. Al did so, and then applied his habitual copyright sticker, the one that would show even under x-rays. King had a whole stack.

Al wondered why he bothered. Surely, if someone took the time to x-ray the painting, they would see the Monet underneath?

“Most people only check the sticker,” King supplied, leaning forward conspiratorially. “Rather slapdash of them, isn’t it?”

Dazed, Al watched as King carefully set aside the finished painting to dry. Could he be charged with a crime, he wondered? Covering up evidence of stolen goods — literally? Not that he’d had any choice in the matter, really. Not that he wouldn’t let any number of Clydesdales clobber him a little if it meant he could feel the swirls and slight staccato brushstrokes of a Monet under his very fingertips.

“Dinner, gentlemen?”

“I’d prefer golf,” said Chris. His voice finally penetrated the fog that had settled over Al.

“Will King Alfred beer do?”

Startled, Al tore his gaze away from the mediocre layers of paint that shouldn’t even have been allowed in the same room as the masterpiece beneath them.

“You’ve done your homework,” he told King.

King grinned, swift and cocksure. “It’s more a hobby than an art.”

* * *

It was by far a more pleasant captivity than his last, especially once the Clydesdale and Shetland took themselves outside with a six-pack of King Alfred’s finest. Al and Chris were now shackled to each other, but what else were friends for? Perhaps Al had overindulged in his late stepfather’s ale, perhaps he was still drunk on the illusion of greatness the Monet had given him, perhaps he was just foolhardy. (He knew what Chris would say.)

“So did you deliberately lure me here to paint over your paintover? I mean your painting?” Al demanded. “Or did we throw a catch in your plans by wrenching onto your forgery?” Okay, so maybe he was laying it on a little thick, but maybe King would let down his guard if he thought Al was less than a sober audience.

King laid an elegant finger alongside his nose. “Ah, that would be telling.”

Chris rolled his eyes expressively in those damn giveaway sockets. “Be sensible, Al. Ask the important questions: what are you going to do with us?”

King spread his arms wide. “Why, let you go, of course. Did you think I meant to throw you off a mountain?”

Al grunted. “It’s been done.”

King’s eyebrows rose. “There’s a story I’d like to hear.” When Al failed to fill the resulting pause, King sighed. “Another time, perhaps. Tell me, do you like horses?”

Chris barked a laugh. “You already know he’s married to a trainer.”

“And lives apart on a mountain,” added King. “If I had so lovely a wife, I don’t believe I would be so distant.”

Al frowned. His marriage was nobody’s business but his and Emily’s. She had her horses and races, he had his paints and mountain, and they had each other. It suited them. That was all that mattered.

“Bet there’s something you don’t know,” countered Chris. 

“Oh?”

“How to hide a racehorse.”

Al smiled modestly and said nothing.

King leaned forward, intrigued, his ale forgotten at his elbow. “How do you hide a racehorse?”

“In a stable, of course,” said Al. “In plain view: the most natural camouflage in the world.”

They sat in companionable silence — the mastermind, the witting but unwilling accomplice, and the disguise-artist-turned-unfortunately-recognizable model — and all was, if not precisely well with the world, at least not utterly buggered (even if Al was).

Chris tipped over against Al and snored in his ear.

The penny dropped.

“You drugged our drinks,” Al observed. His head was floating too far above the rest of him for outrage, but he mustered mild indignation. “Bastard.”

King smiled indulgently. “You’ll feel grand when you wake in — oh, about twelve hours — by which time my associates and I will be well on our way with your painting. Your commission will be on the the table back there, along with the key to your handcuffs. It’s been a pleasure, gentlemen.”

He might have kept talking, but Al was asleep a second after his head slumped and knocked into Chris's.

* * *

King had courteously left a cell phone along with a wad of cash that Al had no intention of depositing anywhere except with his local constabulary. The handcuff key, however, was nowhere to be found — which gave Emily a good laugh when she came to retrieve them.

“I should put you both in back,” she said, nodding at the horse trailer. "But I brought your lockpicks from your car like you asked, Chris." 

"Good. He's all yours, Emily." Chris handed the empty cuffs over with a flourish. "Keep a better eye on him this time."

"That was your job!" protested Al. 

Emily interrupted them before they could renew the good-natured argument that had helped pass the time all morning. "This King of yours, did he leave anything else behind?"

"Beside the money?" Al poked his head back in the old house. "Just the paints... wait a minute."

The easel stood, forlorn, in the middle of the room. But it wasn't empty. A card rested where the canvas normally would. How had he missed it before? 

"Open it," urged Emily.

Chris slouched in the doorway. "Ten to one it's a taunt with a bad pun about golf."

"You were close," he said, handing it over to his wife and then his friend for inspection.

> _To: So-Called Mad Alexander, in recognition of the persistence of human nature._
> 
> _I imagine you will turn the money I left you over to the police, so please let your lovely wife accept the donation of a purebred brood mare to her stable as your commission. The poor girl wouldn't like the climate on my private island, I fear, and needs someone to look after her. I wouldn't give her to anyone else for all the love and money in the world._
> 
> _Her name and pedigree are enclosed. No camouflage required._
> 
> _Yours truly,_
> 
> _Mr. King_

"What's her name?" asked Emily.

Al unfolded the enclosed paper and began to laugh. "What else? _For Love and Monet_." 

**Author's Note:**

> End note: I borrowed the Monet-hiding-under-watercolors trick from _The Thomas Crown Affair_ (1999). I had already written myself into a corner with the Monet and forgeries and was wondering how to tie it all together when Thomas Crown himself waltzed in, in the guise of Mr. King, and solved all my problems — while leaving a few new mysteries in his wake, as always.


End file.
